Review: Kings of War counter set

© Mantic Games

As you all know, I am a big fan of Mantic Games and their attitude towards our hobby. So I was also on board when the second Kickstarter for Kings of War went off. One of the many things I got there is the two player counter set.

At first I thought: What a rip off. It is made from plastic and the looks aren't very appealing. And even more annoying: There was no explanation what the different symbols and colors mean. The only useful thing I saw was the Arc of Sight template and also the round counter is quite nice. The ruler is "OK"ish but I have a very good measuring tape.

In my last game I gave them a try, but since there was no clear explanation what the symbols mean, I just made something up.

© The nice forum guy who made it

Oh if I had found a forum thread earlier. Someone also had these questions and some while ago put down a chart of the symbol and their meanings. Sadly I cannot find the thread anymore because it is more than a year old... It would have made my live so much easier. That is why I have to share it here. Twitter followers may have seen it already yesterday.

So I now have to revise my opinion on those counters quite a bit: As part of my pledge they are pretty cool. You get enough tokens for 2 players, 6 objective markers a Arc of Sight template (which you can also use in other games), a turn counter and a 6" plastic ruler (which most likely is only interesting for new players who don't own their measuring tape yet).

I don't know if I would buy the set though. With 15£ (or 25$/25€) this is not really cheap and is in direct competition with a lots of other sets out there (even Mantic selling one which looks much better). But if you can get your hands on one with a discount I think it is worth thinking of (that is if you are into Kings of War).

Ok, so this mutated to a review. In the beginning I just wanted to share the chart. But more content is always good, no? Hope you enjoyed it.


So long,
Paradox0n

In a deep slumber

Wow. That was some loooong time off. Health issues, Working-Life balance off the mark and a big lack of motivation just stopped me from doing anything wargaming related. But the last weeks this changed a bit and a recent spam comment awakened me from this very deep slumber.

So I am motivated posting stuff again, and I think I have some interesting stuff to post.
First I had birthday and got some great hobby stuff as presents. Second I had some games of Kings of War going (the first one I already posted some time ago) but some followed and last I really get into gaming again. Looks like there is a gaming group in the making and even if it is a good 2 hours drive away, I could be getting some more regular gaming in the future.

I hope someone is still reading here :)


So long,
Paradox0n

Total War: Warhammer

OMG I am so hyped now... Long I could resist, but with the stream offensive and the newest trailer I just can't resist anymore.

Yesterday I got myself a copy and will bring our beloved and destroyed Warhammer world back to life again. What do you think about the game? Heard of it? Interested? You will play it? Tell me! :)

On a side note: I got even more nostalgic and hunted me some very old dragon ogre models on ebay. Can't wait to get them, they will be my Grotesques for my Abyssal Dwarf army :)

#hype


So long,
Paradox0n

KoW2 Batrep: Abyssal Dwarfs vs. Kingdom of Men

So finally I manged to get another tabletop game running. This time I had my first game of Kings of War 2Ed. Most of you know, that I am quite the Mantic Games fanboy but never got a game rolling. This changed now. And another premiere: We did this match in Universal Battle, a Flash based browser utility. NumbDice (which whom I also played my Warmachine/Horde games) lives a good 2.5h drive from me, so we decided to give it a try and used the Free version (with limited armies).

So after we figured out how UB works and setup a map, we placed our armies. To be honest, I didn't have the time to really make an army list, so while NumbDice placed the map, I went to EasyArmy and created one. First surprise: A 750pt army did only take 10 minutes to create, much faster than in WHFB. Scenario was Kill because we didn't want to go overboard on the first game.

Round 1

So after deployment we shuffled our units a bit around. The first Arquebusiers went in cover behind the wall and the flying general moved to the right flank.

I was not sure how strong everything is and moved slowly forward, completely forgetting, that my Decimators only have 12" reach BUT can move and shoot...
Shooting is irrelevant this turn and we both have (although not communicated) no mages in our lists (which made shambling a bit of a hindrance for me because of no surge).

Round 2

NumbDice went on straight backwards in the center and moved up on the right flank a bit more. His shooting did really hurt and my Immortal Guard already had 8 wounds here. Ouch.

So for me it was a straight march forward if I wanted to do anything with my units. My Decimators crawled up the hill to gain sight on the general and my Lesser Obsidian Golems prepared for some action on the right flank here. The Decimators did hit nicely and to my horror I saw that I misread the magical item I gave them. 5pts wasted here but not so bad...

Round 3

The shooting continued and my Immortal Guard got a double charge from the winged general and the Spearman which resulted in a complete wipeout of them. Shooting took more casualties and slowly and steadily I get blown to smithereens.

So my Overmaster flank charged into his general (sadly individuals aren't allowed to double the attacks) and moving the LoG forward to either get charged or getting a charge next round. My Katsuchan Rocket Launcher hit for the first time but didn't cause a waver.

Round 4

Now it gets bloody. The two generals hack at each other, the LoG and the Warriors also and the ugly shooting continues. The Spearblock tries some advanced manouvereing so that I move back to not get a flank charge by them. 

Here we played the terrain rule for walls wrong, I could have moved through them and stopped my movement on top of them.

I put some pressure into the General, but he only wavers. I also put 7 wounds into the Shieldblock, but they stand. Points wise I am now very far in the back. The loss of my Immortal Guard still hurts. My shooting is again useless. Doesn't look good for me.

Round 5

More bloody carnage and some aha effects. My Blacksouls get all the fire ppossible straight into their face and luckily there is the Overmaster with inspiring to save them. The Spearman sidestep to get into position for a flank charge.

My Decimators and my Rocket Launcher fire and I am able to kill the General (which isn't bound in combat anymore), Launcher ineffective as usual.

My LoG kill the Swordman, my Overmaster makes a back charge and it doesn't look so bad anymore...

Round 6

So this turn again brings a surprise: The Spearman ignore my Overmaster and make a flank charge into my Blacksouls. Wow that is something I hadn't in my playbook. My Overmaster now exposed get's all the shooting straight into his face and even he cannot survive a canon shot... The Blacksouls are completely overwhelmed and get so much damage that only snake eyes would save them...

I move up with all I have and try again something with my rocket launcher... and I see something on the profile of it: He has freaking 3 attacks. I was so used that warmachines only have one, that I played it wrong the whole time... That is some change here and he immediately wipes them out.

We roll then if there is another turn but the game ends here.
The game is a Draw with none of us getting a bigger advance (I think it was something around 40pts).

For fun we played out Round 7 which didn't change much since we only get a round of shooting more.

Conclusio

Wow that was a game. All in all it took us nearly 3 hours with all the setup, army making and also some friendly chatting in between. In the end the rounds went so fast, because we got a grab on the rules. As said we both never played a game of KoW until now. We both where absolutely surprised how straight the rules are. There are some major differences to WHFB to which I have to get used to, but these are good changes. Next time we will increase to 1000pts and see how this works.

Some small feedback to Universal Battle: 

I was really surprised how good it works. Sure it is sometimes hard to measure everything on the milimeter exact or sometimes the syncing did not work correctly for us, e.g. when you move with the cursor (you have to nibble the unit then 1mm with the moving tray). But overall it is pretty awesome.

I highly recommend a voice chat though (be it on Skype, Discord, TeamSpeak), that helps to clarify stuff very fast.

So long,

Paradox0n

Experiment: Paint a miniature just by washing...

...and one drybrush for highlights.

So jep that is exactly what I wanted to do today. "Painting" a miniature with only washes and one drybrush step. Why? Because I did read quite a lot of fast painting tutorials who exactly did that for armies like Skaven, Goblins or Tyranids. And as you might know, I still have more than 200 Skaven uncounted numbers of Orcs & Goblins and much much more flying around.
Therefore I just wanted to give it a try. Another reason was, that I hadn't painted for half a year now and just wanted to get a feeling for paints again (and find my brushes, paints etc. pp. after the pimping of our office). Excuse the shabby pictures, I just made them with my smartphone to underline the "do as fast as possible" character of this test :)

The model is a custom made one, I don't even know anymore from which models the body and the arm was, I think from a Monk and a Beasthandler. MAybe I am wrong with that, I just grabbed me something in reach.

First step was priming the model with my trusted Vallejo Primer. I saw here some mold lines but really didn't care about them. The complete thing was more a test than wanting to achive some good results. And since tis is rank & file, noone will have a too close look. At least that is what I am hoping for :)

Then I washed it with Army Painter washes (which I reviewed some time ago). Green for the robe, Soft Tone for the fur, Dark Tone for the metal and Strong Tone for the rope and grip. A bit of Red for the tongue finished that step up.
After waiting some minutes to dry the miniature, I continued with washing, exactly the same order exactly the same tones, to strengthen the colors a bit. This time I checked that I put more color into the recesses.
One thing I did see now, is that the old GW Sepia Ink had a bit more orange/redish tone to it, the Soft Tone is much more brown.

After first wash

After second wash

As you can see the second layer of washes has a quite strong effect. I was really surprised.

I then saw, that the miniature lacked highlights which I couldn't change by just washing more. Thus I did "break the rules" and gave the miniature a fast drybrush with Vallejo Elfic Flesh. After that I gave it the third and last wash.
This time I broke up the washes a bit and mixed some blue into the Dark Tone and some Red into the Browns to introduce a bit of variation, e.g. for the metals and the tail
Then I glued it to a selfmade base and was done.


Is this the best paint job ever done? Well surely not! But it was super fast and had a surprising effect. With some short investment (doing the metals with metallic paint, putting some highlights) this could be ok as a rank & file.

Have to test a bit more with this heavy washing over just a primer. Up until now I only used washes for creating shadows, not for creating base colors.

Experiment succesfull! And I painted finally something!


So long,
Paradox0n

Hordes/Warmachine new MKIII Battle Boxes

As promised I continue to follow the Hype Train and collect more of the rumours and facts about the new edition for Hordes and Warmachine.
One big thing for me are the new Battle Boxes because they always help to draw in new people and normally should also provide older players to get into new editions by providing the rules and stuff for a reasonable price. Most of us will buy the MKIII rulebook nonetheless, but for testing it out those should be perfect.

So lets see what the new boxes will offer us:

• MSRP $40 for a battle group (1 caster and at least 2 large or 3 medium models)
• All necessary cards
• Quick rules
• A paper battlemap and terrain
• A paper ruler, dice and tokens

Additional information to these boxes:

• The caster will be Battle Box only (at least for the first time)
• The material will be the same PVC as today (although precolored)
• The paper battlemap is most likely 24x24", which would perfectly fit for introduction games

My impression so far: 

The paper ruler is garbage (it was already in the current box), the battlemap and terrain I don't need (but are nice for beginners). But still I hope that you get more than only this stupid wall, maybe some markers for woods or so.

The rest sounds awesome! If they really will stick to 40$ (which will most likely be 40€ because they always do it 1:1) sounds like a perfect price for a starter box. Also you get a hopefully useful battlegroup. For me the Legion one is somewhat 50:50 because I already have half of the stuff, but maybe I can convert some of the Shredders. For me, at this point, it is a must buy (and maybe I will also get a second faction now).

More information about MKIII

Nearly a week ago, Privateer Press anounced the new edition for Warmachine/Hordes. Slowly information is trickling into the public and to be honest: I am quite hyped about the bits and pieces that are made public now and are collected in the different communities. Not everything is shiny, but hey I am used to edition changes in Warhammer Fantasy so this can only get good *crossing my fingers* :)

Ok, so let's dig a bit deeper into the stuff and add information to my last post about this topic. This time I try to give also a bit of my opinion to the changes/rumours I picked up.

75 is the new 50 and 50 is the new 35

Points are increased throughout the whole game. It is not exact a doubling of point costs, but overall it seems they increased points. They state that if you are used to a model size today of 50 points it will be roughly 75 points in the future, if you are used to 35 it will be 50.

This change is interesting: I think that will give them a good opportunity to balance models better. I don't know MKI where they had even bigger point costs (which seems to not work well) but MKII was at some points a bit unbalance in point costs. Sometimes you asked yourself: Why do these model cost the same, even if one is cleary stronger. Sure point balance is always a thing, because you also have to count in synergies, counters etc. pp. Therefore I think this could be a good thing that they change something there.

Psychology will change massively

Fear, Terror, and Massive Casualty tests are gone it seems. So they have to rework many models especially Horde solos and beasts. Seems like they want to get rid of fleeing units somehow.

This is a bit unclear to me. I LOVE psychology for your troups. For me this was always a fun factor in games. Nothing more fun than tiny troupers covering in fear from a HUGE battle beast. Or running away if there unit was nearly annihilated in one attack. I have mixed feelings about this one, but not enough information yet about this.

Premeasuring officially allowed 

We have come to believe that eyeballing spatial relations should not be a required skill to play WARMACHINE and HORDES.

Finally! Yes! I know that this is a extremely heated topic. In the Warmachine/Hordes communities you will find lots of emotional and heated discussions about this topic. But for me this gets rid of one of the most annoying things in the game: the hidden measuring over command areas. Yes, it is awesome if you can estimate a 16,5 inch distance (anyone remebers how warmachines worked in earler editions ofWHFB?) but for a competitive game this should not be a prerequisite. I really loved that change in WHFB 8th edition, I love it in KOW and I am pretty sure that they will do it right in Warmachine/Hordes.

Changes to War Room/Faction decks

With the change to the new edition, all faction decks will be updated and have to be rebought. Additionally War Room has gone through a big change, therefore you have to re-buy the decks you already own. Decks bought after January 1st 2016 will get a free update. We others shall get them at a discount.

That was to be expected. Still sad that we have to spend money again but War Room decks are already awesome and I just hope that they reworked the app a bit that it gets more stable and performant.

If you want to get more information, please follow the links to the official sources:

- Primecast Epsiode 30

- Privateer Insider 13/04/2016

Ok that is it for now. There is already more in the pipeline so expect at least one more post about this :)

So long,

Paradox0n